How to Use Old Versions of Laravel Homestead

There are two parts to Homestead: the Vagrant box and the Homestead source code (Homestead app). The Homestead Vagrant box is a snapshot of a preconfigured virtual machine ready to use. This saves you from having to spend time installing things such as PHP, NGINX, etc. We use the Laravel Settler repo to build the Homestead boxes. You have to ensure the version of the Homestead Vagrant box is compatible with the version of the Homestead app you are using.

Why would you want to use a previous version? If you are working on a Laravel 5.1 (the latest LTS version) application, you may still be running PHP 5.5. While Homestead development moves forward pretty quickly, you may not be ready to move your clients from PHP 5.5. While you should have already moved your apps to PHP 7.0 for the performance gains, I understand that because Laravel 5.1 supports 5.5, developers may want to continue using that version.

Right now, it’s not currently possible to use an official version of the laravel/homestead box with PHP 5.5. Unfortunately, the MySQL password has expired, and Homestead will not have a functional MySQL version until you update the password. See this issue on github.com for more info. As you can see in the last post, I’ve built an updated box because I didn’t want to create a “new” release of an “old” box and Homestead no longer “officially” supports older versions of PHP.

How to Use PHP 5.5 With Laravel Homestead

For PHP 5.5 you should use version 2.1.8 of the Homestead app with the Svpernova09/homestead-legacy Vagrant box. This box has been updated to fix the expired MySQL password issue which is broken in the official Homestead box version 0.3.x.

Note: this box is based on Ubuntu 14.04 (as Homestead was at the time).

Edit your Homestead.yaml file:

---
ip: "192.168.10.10"
memory: 2048
cpus: 1
provider: virtualbox
box: Svpernova09/homestead-legacy

Check out version 2.1.8 of the Homestead repo:

cd /path/to/Homestead
git checkout v2.1.8
 
Note: checking out 'v2.1.8'.
 
You are in 'detached HEAD' state. You can look around, make experimental
changes, and commit them;you can also discard any commits you make in this
state without impacting any branches by performing another checkout.
 
If you want to create a new branch to retain commits you create, you may
do so (at any time) by using -b with the checkout command again. Example:
 
git checkout -b <new-branch-name>
 
HEAD is now at 3014840... update version

Now you can run “vagrant up” and check the version of PHP:

vagrant@homestead:~$ php -v
PHP 5.5.9-1ubuntu4.20 (cli) (built: Oct  3 2016 13:00:37)
Copyright (c) 1997-2014 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v2.5.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2014 Zend Technologies
    with Zend OPcache v7.0.3, Copyright (c) 1999-2014, by Zend Technologies
    with Xdebug v2.2.3, Copyright (c) 2002-2013, by Derick Rethans
    with blackfire v1.14.1~linux-x64-non_zts55, https://blackfire.io, by Blackfireio Inc.

How to Use PHP 7.0 With Laravel Homestead

Edit your Homestead.yaml file:

---
ip: "192.168.10.10"
memory: 2048
cpus: 1
provider: virtualbox
version: 0.6.0

Take a look at version 3.1.0 of the Homestead Repo:

cd /path/to/Homestead
git checkout v3.1.0
 
HEAD is now at 7924ab4... version

Now you can run “vagrant up” and check the version of PHP:

vagrant@homestead:~$ php -v
PHP 7.0.13-1+deb.sury.org~xenial+1 (cli) ( NTS )
Copyright (c) 1997-2016 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v3.0.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2016 Zend Technologies
    with Zend OPcache v7.0.13-1+deb.sury.org~xenial+1, Copyright (c) 1999-2016, by Zend Technologies
    with blackfire v1.14.1~linux-x64-non_zts70, https://blackfire.io, by Blackfireio Inc.